Slashdot Mirror
The Physics of Friendship
Santosh Maharshi wrote to mention a Physorg story about a new way to model social networks. From the article: "Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical - and perhaps more rational - applications. The many factors that influence an individual's fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision. By modeling people's interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge 'in a very natural way.'"
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life. ;D
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "in a very natural way.".
Unfortunately for the scientists responsible for the discovery, they still can't seem to get a hot date on Friday nights. :(
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
See that picture at the top of the article? The big cloud with lots of fuzzy stuff in the middle, and then a less populated border?
Most of us were probably the border in high school...
still not as good as this equation.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
"Hey baby, wanna bounce off me in an enclosed area?"
...to describe a riot?
no, READ the ROADMAP. I'm sick of reading posts like this.
human social interaction v 1.0 will be in Geek 2.1.0.4.5. Not 2.0.
people like you who can't be bothered to make any effort installing CVS (make SURE you use cvs-unstable-12-Mar-2006-0435am or later or your machine WILL be DESTROYED. DO NOT POST HERE COMPLAINING IF THIS HAPPENS!!!) and setting up a local CVS branch and pulling the latest unstable-tainted roadmap aren't worth talking to.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
....having the creator of a social networking site add himself to everyone's friend's list isn't the way to create a social network?
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life. ;D
You have misunderstood this completely. It is not an effort to explain the shell that is a Nerd's social life, this is already a well understood phenomenon. This research is part of an ongoing effort to find a sientifically sound solution to the tricky problem of enabling a Nerd to find a girlfriend. If you can't understand human females and their social behavior instinctively, analyze them mathematically until you do. Of course it might take a few more decades before we have quantum computers powerful enough to handle this daunting analytical task but until then basic mathematical research like this is vital.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow